Pretty sure it had to do with the fact that the first RE: Outbreak actually sold quite well (became a GH game, BTW). I'm sure most of the die-hards had moved on to RE: Outbreak 2, but I believe the first one still had a decent online population despite this.

No one really knows why the game was closed in Europe and America. The thing about the Outbreak games is that getting into a game is very hard. Most people tend to stick to closed matches with players they know as opposed to hosting a random game with random players. It is REALLY easy to teamkill people, and cheating is easier. You'll see 100 players online, but only 20 of them would be playing and the others would either be idle or chatting. This is all coming from experince on the US server, as I had never played the European version (and from what I heard, you'd only find 40 people online at the most).

The game is still online in Japan with about 100 people on during peak times. Nobody touches the Japanese version of Outbreak 1. The US version of Outbreak has about 80 people online, but suffers the same issues that File 2 suffers. Before File 2 closed, you'd see 20 people in Outbreak 1 during peak time.

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Yes... but... the problem is that they have not released the binaries to the public.

So far Onlineconsoles is the only site supporting the public distribution of server binaries, and the only site to have released something to users with the Tribes Aerial Assault Master List. Every other effort out there to run a private server for the PS2 has the server being run by a central entity, just like the corporations when they were officially online.

I still need to figure out how to handle this on the forums as I am trying to only support perminant "online forever" games going forward. As the binaries are not in the public domain for RE:O, games like it would not qualify.

_________________The most effective, in this war?
The Bydo have it... and they control it.